Out of the street onto the quai. The police have quit hitting people and begun picking up loot off of the street, but now the Russians are moving in, and enough of them are looking straight at Slothrop. Providentially, one of the girls from the café shows up about now, takes his hand and tugs him along.
“There’s a warrant out for you.”
“A what? They’re doing pretty good without any paperwork.”
“The Russians found your uniform. They think you’re a deserter.”
“They’re right.”
She takes Slothrop home with her, in his pig suit. He never hears her name. She is about seventeen, fair, a young face, easy to hurt. They lie behind a sperm-yellowed bedsheet tacked to the ceiling, very close on a narrow bed with lacquered posts. Her mother is carving turnips in the kitchen. Their two hearts pound, his for his danger, hers for Slothrop. She tells how her parents lived, her father a printer, married during his journeymanship, his wanderyears now stretched out to ten, no word where he’s been since ’42, when they had a note from Neukölln, where he had dossed down the night with a friend. Always a friend, God knows how many back rooms, roundhouses, print shops he slept single nights in, shivering wrapped in back numbers of Die Welt am Montag, sure of at least shelter, like everybody in the Buchdrucherverband, often a meal, almost certainly some kind of police trouble if the stay lasted too long—it was a good union. They kept the German Wobbly traditions, they didn’t go along with Hitler though all the other unions were falling into line. It touches Slothrop’s own Puritan hopes for the Word, the Word made printer’s ink, dwelling along with antibodies and iron-bound breath in a good man’s blood, though the World for him be always the World on Monday, with its cold cutting edge, slicing away every poor illusion of comfort the bourgeois takes for real . . . did he run off leaflets against his country’s insanity? was he busted, beaten, killed? She has a snapshot of him on holiday, someplace Bavarian, waterfalled, white-peaked, a tanned and ageless face, Tyrolean hat, galluses, feet planted perpetually set to break into a run: the image stopped, preserved here, the only way they could keep him, running room to room down all his cold Red suburbs, freemason’s night to night . . . their aproned and kitchen way of going evening or empty afternoon in to study the Δx’s and Δy’s of his drifter’s spirit, on the run—study how he was changing inside the knife-fall of the shutter, what he might’ve been hearing in the water, flowing like himself forever, in lost silence, behind him, already behind him.
Even now, lying beside a stranger in a pig disguise, her father is the flying element of Slothrop, of whoever else has lain here before, flightless, and heard the same promise: “I’d go anywhere with you.” He sees them walking a railroad trestle, pines on long slanted mountains all around, autumn sunlight and cold, purple rainclouds, mid-afternoon, her face against some tall concrete structure, the light of the concrete coming down oblique both sides of her cheekbones, blending into her skin, blending with its own light. Her motionless figure above him in a black greatcoat, blonde hair against the sky, himself at the top of a metal ladder in a trainyard, gazing up at her, all their shining steel roads below crisscrossing and peeling off to all parts of the Zone. Both of them on the run. That’s what she wants. But Slothrop only wants to lie still with her heartbeat awhile . . . isn’t that every paranoid’s wish? to perfect methods of immobility? But they’re coming, house to house, looking for their deserter, and it’s Slothrop who has to go, she who has to stay. In the streets loudspeakers, buzzing metal throats, are proclaiming an early curfew tonight. Through some window of the town, lying in some bed, already browsing at the edges of the fields of sleep, is a kid for whom the metal voice with its foreign accent is a sign of nightly security, to be part of the wild fields, the rain on the sea, dogs, smells of cooking from strange windows, dirt roads . . . part of this unrecoverable summer. . . .
“There’s no moon,” she whispers, her eyes flinching but not looking away.
“What’s the best way out of town?”
She knows a hundred. His heart, his fingertips hurt with shame.
“I’ll show you.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I want to.”
Her mother gives Slothrop a couple of hard rolls to stash inside his pig suit. She’d find him something else to wear, but all her husband’s clothes have been traded for food at the Tauschzentrale. His last picture of her is framed in the light of her kitchen, through the window, a fading golden woman, head in a nod over a stove with a single pot simmering, flowered wallpaper deep-orange and red behind her averted face.
The daughter leads him over low stone walls, along drainage ditches and into culverts, southwesterly to the outskirts of the town. Far behind them the clock in the Peterskirche strikes nine, the sightless Roland below continuing to gaze across the square. White flowers fall one by one from the images of Plechazunga. Stacks of a power station rise, ghostly, smokeless, painted on the sky. A windmill creaks out in the countryside.
The city gate is high and skinny, with stairsteps to nowhere on top. The road away goes curving through the ogival opening, out into the night meadows.
“I want to go with you.” But she makes no move to step through the arch with him.
“Maybe I’ll be back.” It’s no drifter’s lie, both of them are sure that someone will be, next year at about this time, maybe next year’s Schweinheld, someone close enough . . . and if the name, the dossier are not exactly the same, well, who believes in those? She’s a printer’s kid, she knows the medium, she even learned from him how to handle a Winkelhaken pretty good, how to set up a line and take it down, “You’re a May bug,” she whispers, and kisses him good-by, and stands watching him go, a sniffling still girl in pinafore and army boots by the isolated gate. “Good night. . . .”
Docile girl, good night. What does he have for her but a last snapshot of a trudging pig in motley, merging with the stars and woodpiles, something to put beside that childhood still of her father? He impersonates flight though his heart isn’t in it and yet he’s lost all knowledge of staying. . . . Good night, it’s curfew, get back inside, back in your room . . . good night. . . .
He keeps to open country, sleeping when he’s too tired to walk, straw and velvet insulating him from the cold. One morning he wakes in a hollow between a stand of beech and a stream. It is sunrise and bitter cold, and there seems to be a warm tongue licking roughly at his face. He is looking here into the snout of another pig, very fat and pink pig. She grunts and smiles amiably, blinking long eyelashes.
“Wait. How about this?” He puts on the pig mask. She stares for a minute, then moves up to Slothrop and kisses him, snout-to-snout. Both of them are dripping with dew. He follows her on down to the stream, takes off the mask again and throws water at his face while she drinks beside him, slurping, placid. The water is clear, running lively, cold. Round rocks knock together under the stream. A resonant sound, a music. It would be worth something to sit day and night, in and out, listening to these sounds of water and cobbles unfold. . . .
Slothrop is hungry. “Come on. We got to find breakfast.” Beside a small pond near a farmhouse, the pig discovers a wood stake driven into the ground. She begins snuffling around it. Slothrop kicks aside loose earth and finds a brick cairn, stuffed with potatoes ensiled last year. “Fine for you,” as she falls to eagerly, “but I can’t eat that stuff.” Sky is shining in the calm surface of the water. Nobody seems to be around. Slothrop wanders off to check the farmhouse. Tall white daisies grow all over the yard. Thatch-hooded windows upstairs are dark, no smoke comes from the chimneys. But the chicken-house in back is occupied. He eases a big fat white hen up off of her nest, reaches gingerly for the eggs—PKAWW she flies into a dither, tries to peck Slothrop’s arm off, friends come shooting in from outside raising a godawful commotion, at which point the hen has worked her wings through the wood slats so she can’t get ba
ck in and is too fat below the wingpits to get the rest of the way out. So, there she hangs, flapping and screaming, while Slothrop grabs three eggs then tries to push her wings back inside for her. It is a frustrating job, especially trying to keep the eggs balanced. The rooster is in the doorway hollering Achtung, Achtung, discipline in his harem is shot to hell, noisy white tumbleweed hens are barrelassing all over the inside of the coop, and blood is flowing from Slothrop in half a dozen places.
Then he hears a dog barking—time to give up on this hen—comes outside sees a lady in her Wehrmacht auxiliary outfit 30 meters away leveling a shotgun and the dog charging in growling, teeth bared, eyes on Slothrop’s throat. Slothrop goes scrambling around the henhouse just as the gun kicks off a good-morning blast. About then the pig shows up and chases off the dog. Away they go, eggs cradled in pig mask, lady yelling, hens raising hell, pig galloping along beside. There’s a final shotgun blast, but by then they’re out of range.
About a mile farther on they pause, for Slothrop’s breakfast. “Good show,” thumping the pig affectionately. She crouches, catching her breath, gazing at him while he eats raw eggs and smokes half a cigarette. Then they set off again.
Soon they have begun to angle toward the sea. The pig seems to know where she’s going. Far away on another road, a great cloud of dust hangs, crawling southward, maybe a Russian horse convoy. Fledgling storks are trying out their wings over the haystacks and fields. Tops of solitary trees are blurred green, as if smudged accidentally by a sleeve. Brown windmills turn at the horizon, across miles of straw-sprinkled red earth.
A pig is a jolly companion,
Boar, sow, barrow, or gilt—
A pig is a pal, who’ll boost your morale,
Though mountains may topple and tilt.
When they’ve blackballed, bamboozled, and burned you,
When they’ve turned on you, Tory and Whig,
Though you may be thrown over by Tabby or Rover,
You’ll never go wrong with a pig, a pig,
You’ll never go wrong with a pig!
By nightfall they have entered a wooded stretch. Fog drifts in the hollows. A lost unmilked cow complains somewhere in the darkness. The pig and Slothrop settled down to sleep among pines thick with shreds of tinfoil, a cloud of British window dumped to fox the German radars in some long-ago raid, a whole forest of Christmas trees, tinsel rippling in the wind, catching the starlight, silent, ice-cold crownfire acres wild over their heads all night. Slothrop keeps waking to find the pig snuggled in a bed of pine needles, watching over him. It’s not for danger, or out of restlessness. Maybe she’s decided Slothrop needs looking after. In the tinfoil light she’s very sleek and convex, her bristles look smooth as down. Lustful thoughts come filtering into Slothrop’s mind, little peculiarity here you know, hehheh, nothing he can’t handle. . . . They fall asleep under the decorated trees, the pig a wandering eastern magus, Slothrop in his costume a gaudy present waiting for morning and a child to claim him.
Next day, about noon, they enter a slow-withering city, alone on the Baltic coast, and perishing from an absence of children. The sign over the city gate, in burned bulbs and empty sockets, reads ZWÖLFKINDER. The great wheel, dominating the skyline for miles out of town, leans a little askew, grim old governess, sun catching long streaks of rust, sky pale through the iron lattice that droops its long twisted shadow across the sand and into the plum sea. Wind cat-howls in and out the doorless halls and houses.
“Frieda.” A voice calling from the blue shadow behind a wall. Grunting, smiling, the pig stands her ground—look who I brought home. Soon a thin freckled man, blond, nearly bald, steps out into the sun. Glancing at Slothrop, nervous, he reaches to scratch Frieda between the ears. “I am Pökler. Thank you for bringing her back.”
“No, no—she brought me.”
“Yes.”
Pökler is living in the basement of the town hall. He has some coffee heating on a driftwood fire in the stove.
“Do you play chess?”
Frieda kibitzes. Slothrop, who tends to play more by superstition than strategy, is obsessed with protecting his knights, Springer and Springer—willing to lose anything else, thinking no more than a move or two ahead if that, he alternates long lethargic backing and filling with bursts of idiot razzle-dazzle that have Pökler frowning, but not with worry. About the time Slothrop loses his queen, “Sa-a-a-y, waita-minute, did you say Pökler?”
Zip the man is out with a Luger as big as a house—really fast guy—with the muzzle pointing right at Slothrop’s head. For a moment Slothrop, in his pig suit, thinks that Pökler thinks that he, Slothrop, has been fooling around with Frieda the Pig, and that there is about to be a shotgun, or Luger, wedding here—in fact the phrase unto thee I pledge my trough has just arrived in his brain when he realizes that what Pökler’s actually saying is, “You’d better leave. Only two more moves and I’d’ve had you anyway.”
“Lemme at least tell you my story,” blithering fast as he can the Zürich information with Pökler’s name on it, the Russian-American-Herero search for the S-Gerät, wondering meantime, in parallel sort of, if that Oberst Enzian wasn’t right about going native in the Zone— beginning to get ideas, fixed and slightly, ah, erotic notions about Destiny are you Slothrop? eh? tracing back the route Frieda the pig brought him along, trying to remember forks where they might have turned another way. . . .
“The Schwarzgerät.” Pökler shakes his head. “I don’t know what it was. I was never that interested. Is that really all you’re after?”
Slothrop thinks that over. Their coffee cups take sunlight from the window and bounce it back up to the ceiling, bobbing ellipses of blue light. “Don’t know. Except for this kind of personal tie-in with Imipolex G. . . .”
“It’s an aromatic polyimide,” Pökler putting the gun back in his shirt.
“Tell me about it,” sez Slothrop.
Well, but not before he has told something of his Ilse and her summer returns, enough for Slothrop to be taken again by the nape and pushed against Bianca’s dead flesh. . . . Ilse, fathered on Greta Erdmann’s silver and passive image, Bianca, conceived during the filming of the very scene that was in his thoughts as Pökler pumped in the fatal charge of sperm—how could they not be the same child?
She’s still with you, though harder to see these days, nearly invisible as a glass of gray lemonade in a twilit room . . . still she is there, cool and acid and sweet, waiting to be swallowed down to touch your deepest cells, to work among your saddest dreams.
• • • • • • •
Pökler does manage to tell a little about Laszlo Jamf, but keeps getting sidetracked off into talking about the movies, German movies Slothrop has never heard of, much less seen . . . yes here’s some kind of fanatical movie hound all right— “On D-Day,” he confesses, “when I heard General Eisenhower on the radio announcing the invasion of Normandy, I thought it was really Clark Gable, have you ever noticed? the voices are identical. . . .”
In the last third of his life, there came over Laszlo Jamf—so it seemed to those who from out in the wood lecture halls watched his eyelids slowly granulate, spots and wrinkles grow across his image, disintegrating it toward old age—a hostility, a strangely personal hatred, for the covalent bond. A conviction that, for synthetics to have a future at all, the bond must be improved on—some students even read “transcended.” That something so mutable, so soft, as a sharing of electrons by atoms of carbon should lie at the core of life, his life, struck Jamf as a cosmic humiliation. Sharing? How much stronger, how everlasting was the ionic bond—where electrons are not shared, but captured. Seized! and held! polarized plus and minus, these atoms, no ambiguities . . . how he came to love that clarity: how stable it was, such mineral stubbornness!
“Whatever lip-service we may pay to Reason,” he told Pökler’s c
lass back at the T.H., “to moderation and compromise, nevertheless there remains the lion. A lion in each one of you. He is either tamed—by too much mathematics, by details of design, by corporate procedures—or he stays wild, an eternal predator.
“The lion does not know subtleties and half-solutions. He does not accept sharing as a basis for anything! He takes, he holds! He is not a Bolshevik or a Jew. You will never hear relativity from the lion. He wants the absolute. Life and death. Win and lose. Not truces or arrangements, but the joy of the leap, the roar, the blood.”
If this be National Socialist chemistry, blame that something-in-the-air, the Zeitgeist. Sure, blame it. Prof.-Dr. Jamf was not immune. Neither was his student Pökler. But through Inflation and Depression, Pökler’s idea of “the lion” came to have a human face attached to it, a movie face natürlich, that of the actor Rudolf Klein-Rogge, whom Pökler idolized, and wanted to be like.
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